Sleep Info

Learn to Sleep Better

The three cornerstones to a healthy life are diet, exercise and sleep. Sleep is the easiest to fix! Read about the latest sleep research and get advice to help you learn how to get the best night’s rest possible. Check out the links to the left for the latest in sleep research and tips on how to sleep better.

What's Your Zzzz Score

Our goal is to help you learn how to sleep better with sleep tips, advice, articles, and other resources. Take our all-new Zzzz Score, an 8-question survey that assesses your sleep habits and provides personalized tips and information on how to get a better night’s sleep.

Recommended Products

Carpenter Co., the creator of SleepBetter, is the largest manufacturer of comfort cushioning in the world. Since 1948, our focus has been on quality, technology and comfort. We manufacture a wide variety of products, all designed to help you get a great night’s sleep.

Ask SleepBetter: Morning Hallucinations

Have you wondered about something related to sleep, but just can’t find the answer? Lots of people do, and that’s why we created Ask SleepBetter. You can ask your own question on the SleepBetter Facebook Page, or by using our Ask SleepBetter contact form. We will try to answer as many questions as possible, but we are not able to answer queries about physical issues or medicinal issues. Those should be addressed face-to-face with a physician.

Today’s question is from a Facebook friend who sees things in the morning:

“I was just wondering what would cause visual hallucinations when waking. A couple of times in the past after waking up I have seen either spiders on the floor or the wall. Was this due to stress or still being half asleep?”
-Mina (via Email)

As we always recommend, please discuss this with your doctor as soon as possible. It’s best to rule out a physical reason for any sleep problem. With that said, it sounds like you’ve suffered from a form of sleep hallucinations, which are often paired with sleep paralysis. Don’t consider this a diagnosis, because it’s not, but it could explain what you’re describing. Here’s some information from a SleepBetter article in which we described sleep paralysis as the scariest sleep disorder:

During normal sleep, your brain sends a signal to your body to that essentially paralyzes you while you’re dreaming. This keeps you from thrashing around and possibly hurting yourself or your bed partner. When sleep paralysis occurs, however, the brain either switches on your muscle inhibition too soon or doesn’t switch it off when you wake up. This can lead to very creepy experiences where you’re awake but unable to move. Even worse, many people who suffer from sleep paralysis will dream while they’re awake. When you’re asleep, dreaming is normal, but when you’re awake it’s called hallucinating.

The most common hallucinations that occur with sleep paralysis include sensing or seeing another person in the room, being touched, hearing footsteps, floating, or even hearing someone call your name. Episodes of sleep paralysis can last anywhere from 10 seconds to a terrifying 70 minutes. Sleep paralysis has been pointed to as a possible explanation for individuals who believe they’ve been a victim of nighttime alien encounters and abductions.

Chronic sleep paralysis only affects about six percent of adults. Generally, the disorder is related to jet lag, sleep deprivation, stress or even your sleeping position. It’s believed that supine sleep (sleeping on your back) can make a person five times more likely to have an episode of sleep paralysis than any other position.

About Us

Created by Carpenter Co., SleepBetter is here to help with one of the biggest problems facing individuals today: lack of sleep. Diet, exercise and sleep are the cornerstones of good health, and sleep is the easiest to fix. Let us help you! We provide sleep tips and advice through our hundreds of articles, and foster discussion on SleepBetter.org, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Using these tools, we hope to give others the information they need to make a choice to sleep better. If you have a question about sleep, just ask and we’ll try to help with an answer as part of our Ask SleepBetter feature.